A vintage silk dress bought at an antique mall in Maine in 2013 turned out to be hiding an extraordinary piece of 19th-century history. Archaeologist and vintage clothing collector Sara Rivers Cofield discovered a concealed pocket beneath the bustle of the 1880s-era dress, containing several crumpled scraps of paper filled with unfamiliar words, numbers and time-like markings.
For years, the meaning of the mysterious notes remained unknown. Their strange combination of place names, words, numbers and markings prompted theories ranging from personal messages to gambling records and even secret communications. Eventually, researchers discovered that the papers were not mysterious messages at all, but coded weather observations dating back to 1888.
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